This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, offers analysis, commentary, and reportage about the $4.9 billion project to build the Barclays Center arena and 16 high-rise buildings at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park Brooklyn in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland Group bought a 70% stake in 15 towers. New York State still calls it Atlantic Yards. Note: archive at right.

MAS Summit: is the path to sustainable housing changes in the housing code and work rules? Also, the savings from unsexy rehabs

What's the secret to developing sustainable and affordable housing? According to a housing panel at the Municipal Art Society's Summit for New York City Oct. 21-22, advocates might focus not on the availability of subsidies but on ways to bring construction costs down and to make better use of available space.

"The biggest impact you can actually have on the environment is live in smaller spaces and live in a shared household… and use mass transit," said Moderator Jerilyn Perine, Executive Director, Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC).

She noted that nearly half the people in Manhattan live alone. "Since a single person consumes 53% more energy than a single person who lives with other people, this is an overconsumption of housing," she said.

CHCP has advocated for housing code changes to allow more people to live together and to revise standards for single units. "In other places in the world, they are rethinking how to use space on the inside," she said. "That sadly is not really happening here."

At the same time, Perine noted an "underconsumption" in neighborhoods where housing is overcrowded: some 750,000 families are doubled up, living with at least one other head of household.

High cost of construction

Julia Vitullo-Martin, Director, Center for Urban Innovation, Regional Plan Association (RPA), said that in New York construction costs are " disproportionately expensive," substantially more expensive than even in union-dominated cities like Chicago and Boston and "ludicrously more expensive than in nonunion cities like Dallas."

While a few years ago, that didn't matter much, given New York's success, "now we're in a very different environment," she said, "and some of these other cities are looking extremely attractive."

At an event last year at the Manhattan Institute, Vitullo-Martin's former office, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, "made the astonishing comment that the city he feared most in the U.S. was Chicago."

She said that a Manhattan Institute study "a few years ago" of construction costs found New York's at $352 a square foot and Chicago at $163. (I'm not sure what type of building.)

More recently, she said, a commercial one-story building in New York was $215/sf, while Chicago was $187, Los Angeles $176, the District of Columbia $162, and Dallas $139..

Cost factors and CBAs

Vitullo-Martin said "everything" contributes to higher costs, including land, construction materials, the cost of shipping, and permitting and land use regulations.

"And to this we may soon be adding mandatory CBAs [community benefits agreements]," she added. "You may well think CBAs are good: why shouldn't communities get their cut? There may well be an argument, but truth is, that's going to be one more costly layer."

(Here's more of her critique of a recent report issued by Comptroller John Liu's task force.)

How to lower labor costs

Vitullo-Martin said that she and RPA colleague Hope Cohen have just started a study of labor costs, an "extremely expensive" factor, but subject to renegotiation.

"We've simply taken as a given high costs of wages/benefits," she said. "We're going to look at the uncompetitive practices, whether part of a contract, part of tradition--jurisdictional disputes where site gets shut down or work not done because it's the work of electrician or carpenter. They don't have those kind of jurisdictional disputes in Washington."

She said they'd studied a pair of matched residential towers, one built union, one non-union. The first took 30 months, at $365/sf. The second took 36 months, at $280/sf. "The builder believes second building better, because he didn't have jurisdictional disputes," she said.

"If green is our objective, we have to get away from the idea that buildings cost what they cost and government is simply going to make up the difference," Vitullo-Martin said. "Government isn't going to make up difference much longer."

Later, she was asked, "To what extent is organized crime and corruption being factored in your analysis of building cost, and are you advocating busting up of trade unions?"

Vitullo-Martin responded no to the second question, saying they were looking at work practices and jurisdictional disputes. She responded obliquely to the first question: "As for the mob, historically, the mob has been a problem in construction industry."

The Enterprise Community Partners' Green Communities initiative has done a study that calculated it costs $1917 per dwelling unit to implement energy- and water-saving measures that save $4851 over the unit lifestyle.

Given that a lot of affordable projects dependent on government financing, Perine asked, "should government be subsidizing big new construction if they could do ten moderate rehabs?"

Bomee Jung, Program Director for Enterprise, said, "We do have an obligation to pay attention to these projects, not necessarily the sexiest [ones]."

Later, Vitullo-Martin added that "it would be very useful if city thought about zoning/permitting to unleash more extensive building," such as live/work zoning to allow both housing and small manufacturing or artists' space.

While that's part of the lawsuit, more prominent are claims of racial discrimination and retaliation, with black employees claiming repeated abuse by white supervisors, preferential treatment toward Hispanic colleagues, and retaliation in response to complaints.

Two individual supervisors, for example, are charged with referring to black employees as “black motherfucker,” “dumb black bitch,” “black monkey,” “piece of shit” and “nigger.”

Two have referred to an employee blind in one eye as “cyclops,” and “the one-eyed guy,” and an employee with a nose disorder as “the nose guy.”

There's been no official response yet though arena spokesman Barry Baum told the Daily News they, but take “allegations of this kind very seriously” and have "a zero tolerance policy for…

To supporters of Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, it's a long-awaited plan for long-overlooked land. "The Atlantic Yards area has been available for any developer in America for over 100 years,” declared Borough President Marty Markowitz at a 5/26/05 City Council hearing.

Charles Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, mused on 11/15/05 to WNYC's Brian Lehrer, “Isn’t it interesting that these railyards have sat for decades and decades and decades, and no one has done a thing about them.” Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco, in a 12/19/04 New York Times article ("In a War of Words, One Has the Power to Wound") described the railyards as "an empty scar dividing the community."

But why exactly has the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Vanderbilt Yard never been developed? Do public officials have some responsibility?

At right is a photo of a poster spotted in Hasidic Williamsburg right. Clearly there's an event scheduled at the Barclays Center aimed at the Haredi Jewish community (strict Orthodox Jews who reject secular culture), but the lack of English text makes it cryptic.

The website Matzav.com explains, Protest Against Israeli Draft of Bnei Yeshiva Rescheduled for Barclays Center:
A large asifa to protest the drafting of bnei yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel into the Israeli army that had been set to take place this month will instead be held on Sunday, 17 Sivan/June 11, at the Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn, NY.
So attendees at a big gathering will protest an apparent change of policy that will make it much more difficult for traditional Orthodox Jewish students--both Hasidic (who follow a rebbe) and non-Hasidic (who don't)--to get deferments from the draft. Comments on the Yeshiva World website explain some of the debate.

First mentioned in April, the Atlantic Yards project in Atlanta is moving ahead--and has the potential to nudge Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn further down in Google searches.

According to a 5/30/17 press release, Hines and Invesco Real Estate Announce T3 West Midtown and Atlantic Yards:
Hines, the international real estate firm, and Invesco Real Estate, a global real estate investment manager, today announced a joint venture on behalf of one of Invesco Real Estate’s institutional clients to develop two progressive office projects in Atlanta totalling 700,000 square feet. T3 West Midtown will be a 200,000-square-foot heavy timber office development and Atlantic Yards will consist of 500,000 square feet of progressive office space in two buildings. Both projects are located on sites within Atlantic Station in the flourishing Midtown submarket.
Hines will work with Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture (HPA) as the design architect for both T3 West Midtown and Atlantic Yards. DLR Group will be t…

Pacific Park Brooklyn is seriously delayed, Forest City Realty Trust said yesterday in a news release, which further acknowledged that the project has caused a $300 million impairment, or write-down of the asset, as the expected revenues no longer exceed the carrying cost.

The Cleveland-based developer, parent of Brooklyn-based Forest City Ratner, which is a 30% investor in Pacific Park along with 70% partner/overseer Greenland USA, blamed the "significant impairment" on an oversupply of market-rate apartments, the uncertain fate of the 421-a tax break, and a continued increase in construction costs.

While the delay essentially confirms the obvious, given that two major buildings have not launched despite plans to do so, it raises significant questions about the future of the project, including:if market-rate construction is delayed, will the affordable h…

Real Estate Weekly, reporting on trends in Chinese investment in New York City, on 11/18/15 quoted Jim Costello, a senior vice president at research firm Real Capital Analytics:
“They’re typically building high-end condos, build it and sell it. Capital return is in a few years. That’s something that is ingrained in the companies that have been coming here because that’s how they’ve grown in the last 35 years. It’s always been a development game for them. So they’re just repeating their business model here,” he said.
When I read that last November, I didn't think it necessarily applied to Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, now 70% owned (outside of the Barclays Center and B2 modular apartment tower), by the Greenland Group, owned significantly by the Shanghai government.
A majority of the buildings will be rentals, some 100% market, some 100% affordable, and several--the last several built--are supposed to be 50% market/50% subsidized. (See tentative timetable below.)Selling development …

As I've written, Mayor Bill de Blasio sure knows how to steer and spin coverage of his affordable housing initiatives.

Indeed, his latest announcement, claiming significant progress, came with a pre-press release op-ed in the New York Daily News and then a friendly photo-op press conference with an understandably grateful--and very lucky--winner of an affordable housing lottery.

To me, though, the most significant quote came from Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, who, as the Wall Street Journal reported:
said public housing had been “starved” of federal support for years now, leaving the city with fewer ways of creating affordable housing. “Are we relying too heavily on the private sector?” she said. “There is no alternative.”
Though Glen was using what she surely sees as a common-sense phrase, it recalls the slogan of a politician with whom I doubt de Blasio identifies: former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative who believed in free markets.